Photo: Andrew Alexander  

Few things are more distressing in a theatre reviewer’s daily round than a show that excites neither wild praise nor outright condemnation. When a play is “OK” — to wit, Beverley Cooper’s Janet Wilson Meets the Queen now making its world premiere at the Great Canadian Theatre Company — it’s tough to know what to say about it.

This show should have traction. As we know from Innocence Lost: A Play About Steven Truscott  that played the NAC in 2013, Cooper can write in an empathetic, trenchant style as she confronts complex social issues through compelling characters.

In the case of Janet Wilson Meets the Queen, both the characters (all confronting their own, intertwined crises) and the issues (they are multiple) kind of resonate, but not really.

Janet (an appropriately stiff-limbed Marion Day) is a late-1960s Vancouver housewife whose chipper manner and fixed smile cover a growing anxiety as the world shifts beneath her knitted-slipper clad feet.

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PALACE OF THE END
a reading, of Judith Thompson’s award winning play
featuring: Mary Ellis, Chris Ralph & Norah Paton
directed by Laurie Fyffe

WHERE: Acting Company Studio
WHEN: Saturday, May 7, 2016
TIME: 7:30 PM
Admission: PWYC – suggested minimum $10.
This is a Canadian Actors’ Equity Association Production, under the Artists’ Collective Policy. 
All proceeds will go toward the Knox Church Refugee Sponsorship Fund to support a refugee family from Aleppo, Syria.
Such is the power of Thompson’s talent that even the chest-thumping newshounds who see the show may find themselves recalling that the earliest reports of man’s inhumanity to man took the form of poems, recited beside a crashing sea. – The New Yorker
Compelling, often shocking, riveting. – The Associated Press
Powerful! Three pitch-perfect …scalding monologues.” – The New York Times
Winner of the 2008 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize
Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New play, 2008
Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award, 2009

Edward Albee’s biting social commentary hits its audience with full force in Bear and Co’s production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? directed by Ian Farthing. The dark comedy brings the infamous, unsparing duo of George and Martha to life. This darkly comedic story may be a classic piece of Americana, yet this production brings a fresh interpretation to this evening-gone-wrong. What starts out as a fairly naturalistic set-up quickly spirals into the realm of the psychological. The characters are tossed into an existential mess, fueled by personal stagnation and alcohol, that none of them can leave.

George, a history professor, and his wife Martha, the daughter of the college’s president, return from a party and the barrage of high-brow insults begins even as the play opens. Though it’s already 2 a.m., Martha announces the imminent arrival of two guests. Nick and Honey – a young professor, new to the college, and his wife—are unassuming and out of place in George and Martha’s den of despair. But the volley of cruelty has just begun and Nick and Honey have no idea what they’re up for.

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Photo:Andrew Alexander. Paul Rainville (left), Ian Farthing (right)

If you’ve never seen the stage version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Edward Albee’s acerbic portrait of a dysfunctional marriage, here’s your opportunity. Although perhaps not as shocking today as in the early 60s, the relationships between the characters and Albee’s wonderful word-play and cynical humor are not the least bit dated. The difference perhaps, is that today a young couple either witnessing or becoming the brunt of such vicious verbal attacks would excuse themselves, leave and call social services.

The characters of George and Martha have become part of the cultural landscape as symbols of destructive battling spouses. In spite of their fierce sniping, the play is basically a love story – a love story of co-dependents. We can see the seeds of a similar relationship in the young couple as well. The play examines the fundamental question of what is truth and what is illusion; more importantly, what illusions are necessary in order to live.

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Photo: Maria Vartanova.

Despite all the nudge-nudge-wink-wink exploitive publicity and jokes, Calendar Girls is not mainly about a group of middle-aged-to-senior women posing nude.

Rather it is a story of friendship and the continuing ripples of successful fundraising that began with an unusual idea.

Based on the true story of a charitable project by a Women’s Institute in the Yorkshire Dales, the fictionalized version of Calendar Girls started as a 2003 movie starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters. Five years later, Tim Firth adapted his movie script into a stage play. (A musical featuring the story debuted in England earlier this year.)

The idea that a creative member presented to the WI was intended to honour the recently deceased husband of another member — her closest friend — by raising money for leukemia research through sales of the annual WI calendar. In place of the usual landscapes, local buildings or recipes, this calendar would feature the WI members tastefully unclad.

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To say that Ottawa actor Pierre Brault is a shape-shifting, identity-changing wonder doesn’t tell the whole story. His latest offering, Will Somers, is winning enough to attract even those playgoers who are getting sick and tired of one-man shows. Indeed, its impressive artistry raises an often overworked genre to a superior level.

At the Gladstone, Brault is delivering a robustly entertaining 90-minute excursion into the world of Will Somers, the witty and inspired fool who served as court jester to King Henry Vlll and survived to tell the tale. Do Will’s memories lurch over the line into the “tall-tale” category? Who knows? Who cares? This Will, in his own way, is the type of performance artist always ready to provide fodder for our amused speculation. We happily suspend judgement: given that our literature is full of unreliable narrators, is it really wrong in this instance to sacrifice truth for the sake of a good story? Hence, we’re easily drawn into those moments of sly innuendo mischievously conjured up by Pierre Brault’s Will when he gets onto the subject of Henry’s soured daughter, Mary, and the real nature of his relationship with her.

Noel Coward observed on more than one occasion that he was the kind of artist who takes light entertainment seriously. The same might be said of Pierre Brault who, in scripting this piece, has clearly done some meticulous homework on behalf of a historical figure whose life is more often than not shrouded in obscurity. …

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To survive as a court jester, at least under Henry VIII, was to walk a balance beam. You were expected to point out, humorously, royal follies, but cut too close to the bone and your neck was the one being sliced. You were a kind of confidante to the monarch without ever quite knowing where the invisible and shifting line of intimacy sat. You were to use words as currency in a world where innuendo and half-truths were the coin of the realm.

William (“Will”) Somers, Henry’s fool for two decades until the king’s death in 1547, navigates that beam with aplomb in Pierre Brault’s fleet, funny and sometimes dark imagining of the fool’s life under the monarch.

Virtually nothing is known of Somers, though plenty is of the bloody era when Henry’s growing intemperance and the conflict between Catholics and Protestants reportedly resulted in the death of 70,000 opponents to the king. The “most frightening man on the planet,” Somers calls his boss at one point.

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Photo: Courtesy of Gladstone theatre. Will Somers!

Long before the phrase became a cliché, jesters were speaking truth to power. As entertainers and critics, court jesters, or fools, held more sway than their station in the social hierarchy warranted, through medieval times, the Renaissance and beyond.

Even in this context, the King’s Fool Will Somers was remarkable among jesters for the length of his service — from 1525, when he was first introduced to King Henry VIII, until the monarch’s death in 1547 and on through the reigns of Henry’s son, Edward, and daughter, Mary. (He was rumoured to be the only man who could make Mary Tudor laugh). His last public performance was at the coronation of Mary’s sister, Elizabeth I, in 1558, two years before his death.

As presented by Pierre Brault in his newest one-man show, Will Somers is intelligent, funny, earthy, irreverent, yet caring and intensely loyal to his Tudor masters. Little wonder that the Brault version of Somers kept his head through a bloody period of history and religious conflict.

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Photo: Wendy Wagner

Neil Simon’s 50-year-old comedy portraying the myriad ways in which incompatible roommates can drive each other crazy is almost as amusing as it was before Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon inhabited the characters of the slobbish Oscar Madison and the OCD neat freak Felix Ungar in the 1968 movie version.

Considering that the concept was also a TV series featuring the odd pairing, as well as numerous stage versions over the years, yet another view of Oscar and Felix poses a considerable challenge.

In the current Kanata Theatre production, directed and designed by Jim Clarke and Ron Gardner, Bernie Horton offers a suitably slobbish Oscar. Laid back and smiling, even when losing in the weekly poker game, his anger with Felix when he finally tosses him out provides a fine contrast, but some glimpses of that hard edge early on would have made for a more rounded characterization.

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